The veteran comedian is opening up about her 'painful' experience working with Goldberg.
Rosie O’Donnell recently sat down with Andy Cohen on his SiriusXM radio show, Radio Andy, where she opened up about her long-standing feud with Whoopi Goldberg, which contributed to her second departure from The View in 2015 after only five months. She'd previous been on the show for one season in 2007.
"There’s a fair characterization to say that before I went on the show, [Goldberg] was not that interested in The View," she claimed. "She wouldn’t talk when there were other guests, she would just sit there…disengaged."
O’Donnell said she began to feel some animosity from the fellow comedienne over moderating duties, which led to on-air fights.
"So, when they asked me to do it, I went and talked to her and said, 'Are you sure you wanna do it? I only wanna do it with you. It’s an election year. This would be great,'" she shared. "Now, I have known her for many, many years and always looked up to her. So, I was very surprised at what went down."
"I thought we were gonna be like, you know, Scottie Pippen and Michael Jordan, passing the ball back. Throwing the layups up," she added. "I don’t have a real competitive side with other women. I wanna support other women. I wanna try to help other women. So, um, it got off to the wrong foot. Like, one of the first days, the camera guys were going, 'Cut, go to commercial' and she was still talking. And then there was, like, a little brief period where she took a breath or something and I said, 'Listen, we’ll get to that right after this one, we’ll be right back' and she was not having it."
"And who cares who gets to say ‘we’re going to break,' right?" she explained. "It was really painful to me to feel how much she didn’t like me."
O'Donnell also admitted that she wishes she had never agreed to be interviewed for Ladies Who Punch: The Explosive Inside Story of The View, a tell-all book which shed light on her fractious relationship with Goldberg.
"It was literally, Andy, 15 minutes in a restaurant by my house with Cindy Berger, who is a friend of [author Ramin Setoodeh]," she says. "So, she said, 'Please do it.' She begged me to do. I go, 'I'll do 15 minutes.' But yeah, I shouldn't have done it at all. I didn't wanna do it."
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